Because the inter-county league is effectively a warm up competition.
Thereâs no reason other than the continued indulgence of managerial gobshitery why you canât run club championship and inter-county championship with some crossover.
Club leagues are a joke as it is.
The cliched mantra of the club lobby was âwe want regular gamesâ. No distinction between club league and club championship.
You mentioned important games. Again, this is a moving of goalposts.
If club championship games are the only important games club players can play, then by definition there can never be a regular diet of important games, because the maximum amount of games you can play in any properly organised club championship (if replays are to become a thing of the past) is six.
That by definition cannot constitute a regular diet of important games. You could have three important games in a year and thatâs it.
And thus , if weâre to believe you, the club lobby mantra of âwe want regular gamesâ is exposed as bullshit.
Regular games by definition will mean that most of your games arenât important, because leagues arenât taken seriously. And itâs the players themselves who decide that.
Weâve had Sam Maguire and Dublin players up six years in a row when times were good . Iâd say out of 100 kids playing for our group in Crokes a handful know who Cian OâSullivan is.
Theyâd wear the Dublin jerseys and the training tops alright but I donât think it registers as much as youâd think. Not until 11 or 12 anyway.
The effect it does have is on parents and Dublin GAA is âcoolâ and has a socially acceptable status that is aspirational now. So those parents bring their kids to GAA without themselves having a GAA background.
Thatâs the effect the marketing/TV has. Itâs on non GAA background parents. Thatâs who the clubs and GAA are chasing (as well as GAA background folk) to get them to fill the nurseries and not rugby or soccer.
Again, the club mantra was âwe want regular gamesâ.
Are you now admitting this was a lie?
The people who matter most in all this are the general sporting public. Because they are the people who bring the interest and the money and keep the inter-county championships as the showpiece competitions in Irish sport.
It is utterly bizarre that the extremist club lobby sees it as a badge of pride to want to push them away.
We wanted regular games, yes. The club leagues, the warm up competition followed by the club championship which is exactly how it has worked out.
If they are being pushed away, which I donât think there is much evidence for, it has a lot more to do with the structure of the championships than the split season.
The bottom line is clubs dont actually want Championship games until mid August as there are too many distractions like Weddings, Stags, Holidays, J1âs, Concerts, Festivals etc in May/June/July up to the August Bank Holiday weekend.
Split season is definitely the way to go and theyâve made decent progress with it for Year 1.
Most people here seem to be agreed that it needs to go back 4-6 weeks. It all feels so rushed as it is at the moment and a real sense of getting fixtures out of the way as quickly as possible. It smacks of Division 7 club league fixtures, such is the urge to get matches out of the way as quickly as possible with gimmicks like penalty shoot outs and free taking shoot outs and underage grade games played on a Monday night.
Provincial finals have been great and historical occasions for well over a century. Having all four of them on football in the space of just over 24 hours and going head to head with European Cup finals in soccer and rugby is just farcical.
From the limited amounts of championship action that Iâve seen, crowds in the main have looked pitiful. If they persist in paying it off in mid April and May, could well go same way of killing off public interest the way they did with the former U21 championships.
There was no game on RTE at 2pm last Sunday. Youâd think it would have been an easy fix to play one of them then. Having said that, the 2 provincials that are on today are always shit and nobody watches them anyway
The inter-county league attracts decent attendances.
Nobody goes to club league games and they arenât taken seriously. Therefore it makes no difference when club league games are scheduled. They will be treated with the same amount of seriousness whenever they are played, ie. virtually none. But they are games. Which is what the club lobby said they wanted. So what is the problem with playing club league games in June, July and August?
Whereas it makes a big difference when the inter-county leagues are scheduled. They have to be scheduled before the championship for them to be taken with a degree of seriousness because if they are interspersed with the championship, managers and spectators will only focus on the championship and the league games will become challenge games. Thatâs what happened with the 1997 NHL.
But club championship round robins can easily be scheduled in May and June because it will still be taken seriously - because itâs championship.
As are the club leagues.
. Iâd say out of 100 kids playing for our group in Crokes a handful know who Cian OâSullivan is.